


White Noise, White Light, and the Deep

by DesdemonaKaylose



Series: #48 verse [4]
Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: 48 verse, Hostage Situations, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Some Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-22 05:16:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13757088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: Do you think he would still love you if he knew? How far do you believe in him? How far does he believe in you?





	1. What the Water Gave Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Those of you who follow me on tumblr will recognize most of this chapter.

Jack lifts his hand to flip the sign on the shop to _open,_ and he pauses. He's remembered a dream, all at once, about the caverns of the earth and the light streaking across the sky, and he lifts his head up. The morning is breaking over them all, all the sleeping bodies and weary heads, and here he is, inside the strange ribcage of the city that doesn't want him but can't seem to let him go.

It's so quiet. For a moment, it seems that this peace must be the natural state of the world, although he knows all too well it isn't. Peace never lasts. His days of respite are numbered, numbers which are not known to him. But now, half awake and alone in the lavender wash of morning, he could almost believe that this moment will last forever.

Later, there will be action and excitement and bad coffee, but right now, there is only the cool white pulse of Venus on the horizon.

 

 

The moment he’s reached the office, Jack says, in lieu of hello: “Can I use your computer?”

Today he’s hanging out at the Wayne office while construction finishes outside of the butcher’s shop. Three days prior, some telekinetic troublemaker had ripped up the sidewalk for a mile down their street during a pitched battle with a whole cohort of Robins—Jack had actually grabbed himself a coffee and spectated a bit, waving at the couple of kids he recognized as they swung overhead. The one called Damian, from the party months ago, deigned to stop by and check up on him during the wrap-up. He’d had an awful lot of questions about Bruce, about what he was doing and where he’d been lately and whether Jack had any reason to suspect something was wrong with him. Worrying stuff. Baseless, of course, because Bruce was just obsessing over R&D and taking his usual business trips like normal, but still worrying. Anyways, this is Jack’s second day around the office and with one or two specific exceptions, it’s been a surprisingly warm reception. At the moment he’s helping Bruce’s secretary print up a notice about the potluck luncheon coming up, which is apparently a thing that people who work in offices have periodically.

Bruce looks up from his work. His tie is loose and askew around his neck as the sheaves of papers settle around him in disorganized piles like a flock of perturbed geese. Instead of answering, he swivels the monitor around and pushes the keyboard across the desk, and goes back to desperately rifling through his R&D department’s last fifteen years of quarterly reports. Like he’s been doing for weeks.

Jack drags over one of the nice wooden guest chairs and pecks away at the keyboard for a minute, trying to get the effect just right on the screen. Bruce’s obsession with the R&D department is starting to get the better of Jack’s curiosity, but he’s trying not to ask too many questions about it. Every time he brings it up, Bruce gets this weird blank look on his face that Jack is tempted to classify as guilt. Each time, Jack retreats. He’s as loathe to shatter their quiet peace as he is absolutely dying of curiosity.

Jack strides through the hall, hands in pockets, nodding to various employees he’s come to be acquainted with. Some of them even smile back. Bruce is fiercely loved in his offices—and is it any surprise? He’s Gotham’s golden child, and not a half bad boss to boot. A little of that love splashes over his cup and falls on Jack. At the printer station he hums some old song while the machine spits out hot paper, smelling comfortingly of singed plastic. When he turns, strategic marketing director Jerry Spight is leant up against the padded edge of the cubical, watching him.

“You’re back,“ Jerry says, sipping green tea from a Styrofoam cup. "Two days in a row. You doing temp work now?” 

“No, just,” Jack casually flips his page around so the words are concealed against his hip, “helping Bruce out with a couple things.”

Jerry gives the floor, his cup, and the printer a series of looks that concisely imply what _he_ thinks Jack is helping Bruce out with. It has nothing to do with printing. Jack bristles.

“How long’s it been with you guys,” Jerry asks, “six months?”

“Anniversary’s in March,” Jack agrees, although in his mind the beginning will always be that night on the overpass, the darkness and the light blazing down over Bruce like an alien halo, holy and terrible. He can close his eyes and be back there even now.

“Doing anything special?” Jerry asks. Jerry asks a lot of questions.

Jack shrugs self consciously. He knows Bruce will remember the date—Bruce remembers everything, dates no exception—and he knows that folks probably expect certain things from a boyfriend of his caliber. Hawaii or Cocomo or something. He’s a little bit afraid of being surprised with something big like that. A little bit afraid of having to accept something like that, when he can barely afford a nice second hand watch at the pawn shop.

“You’re a lucky guy,” Jerry says. He sips his unsweetened green tea and wrinkles the corner of his mouth. “Somebody like you—once in a lifetime chance.”

Jack smiles. “You mean cause I’m ugly?” he asks, “Or cause I’m poor?”

Jerry eyes him, not quite willing to commit to the blunt direction this conversation is going. Jack just keeps smiling. He pats the man’s shoulder on his way out.

“If I did what a hundred whitebread socialites couldn’t manage in twenty years, with this face,” Jack says, “that almost qualifies as talent, don’t you think?”

He turns the corner into the main hall and his smile immediately drops. “Please and thank you,” he says, as he rips some tape off a passing dispenser. He circles the halls until he finds the elevator nearest Jerry’s windowless office, and quickly scribbles a note in pen over the back of the sheet he’d printed. It’s fine. He’s not _hurting_ anybody. Once he’s satisfied, he slaps his makeshift notice up next to the doors and tapes it in place.

It reads, entirely false but in big cheerful letters, "Thank you to Jerry Spight for providing Lunch for the office on Tuesday! Please leave your lunch orders on his desk by 4 PM Tomorrow.”

He steps back and takes just a moment to appreciate his handiwork. Some days, he thinks to himself, some days are good days.

  
 

 

 

Jack carefully lays the newspaper across the counter, with the headline featuring a grainy photograph of the fugitive Scylla, and takes a sip of the office coffee. It's a little better than sludge. Doesn't seem to matter how nice the office is, everywhere he's been the communal coffee pot always tastes like hell.

One of the guys from the tech support wing looks up from the card game he's shuffling, which is not any kind of deck Jack recognizes, and glances over the headline. He makes a doubtful noise.

"They still haven't caught those freaks?"

Jack pauses in his quest for the comics, they change sections by the day of the week, and gives the headline a second look. It's mostly old news, as far as he can tell. There hasn't been a break in the case since the chaos days before, when the last sighting happened. Dead end. Disappeared like smoke. The article is basically just a speculation piece, wondering what the gang is really after.

"You know they got one of the company guys in the crossfire," techy joe says, tapping the photo with two fingers. "Down at the warehouse. Took one right through the neck."

Jack, who has heard Bruce quietly talking on the phone with the father of the deceased, says, "Yeah. I heard."

Techy, in his white collar and his hands full of colorful trading cards, says, "That's just how it is in this fucking city, I guess. I'd go to the funeral but I've already used up all my funeral leave for the year."

"I'm sure Bruce would give you clearance," Jack says, making a face at the dregs of his coffee.

The other man gives him a strange look. Suddenly those dregs aren't bothering him as much as this conversation is. Jack buries his face in his cup, to hide his unease. He knows that Bruce would--Bruce is going to the funeral himself, actually. There's a current of something almost like guilt that is running underneath every conversation Bruce has about it, every call he takes. It would probably make him feel better if he could do something helpful for one of his living employees. But maybe that was the wrong thing to say. He doesn't even really know this person, except by department.

"It'll be fine," the man says at last. He pushes the newspaper away and goes back to his cards, shuffling them in no particular way. "I'll send flowers or something."

Jack smiles uncertainly and stands up, eager to get away from this moment and all the unsaid things that he cannot parse. There's got to be something else he can do here. Something useful. At the very least, he could keep himself entertained.

What he's really dying to check out, he decides, are those R&D documents that Bruce is so obsessed with lately. Jack has always suspected there is something lurking beneath the surface of Wayne Enterprises. Maybe it’s time to see the face of it.

But it’s been remarkably difficult to get his hands on those documents, as it turns out. Bruce is pleasant but firm about confidentiality, and he never leaves them unattended on the table or in an unlocked drawer. The more Jack tries to get close to them, the more he realizes that Bruce is actively guarding them. After being thwarted for the umpteenth time this week, Jack is really at a loss. He doesn't want to be _nosey_ , it's just that he's... a little thin on patience.

He hardly notices that he’s made it to the elevator until he’s already on it. He studies the grid of buttons for a moment, first blindly and then with dawning interest. What if he…

Jack hits the button for the basement, and then rides the long trip down to R&D in a nervous fit. He has no idea what he’s doing.

The hallway down here is sparse, when he steps off the elevator. They don’t have the marble fixings of the office floor or the stylish steel minimalism of the lab floors. It’s just a hallway, concrete and florescent lights, and at the end of it: a door.

Jack presses his hand against the scanner, but no dice. Down here there’s not even a retinal, which is kind of weird. From the way Bruce was handling those documents, Jack expected high security. Could it be something as simple as embezzlement hiding in those papers, nothing truly strange or unusual at all? He can’t get square with the idea. There is something in his bones that won’t let him rest.

As he's tapping at the pad, looking for any buttons he could fiddle around with, the elevator slid open and revealed the shape of Lucius Fox, in the process of tugging his lab coat on.

“Oh,” Lucius says. He comes down the hall at a brisk but unworried pace, hands in his pockets. “Mr… Ah, Jack, wasn’t it?

Jack waves at him. “Lucius, buddy, how are you?”

“Living on caffeine, same as always,” Lucius says. He seems a little taken aback at the familiar address, but he rallies quickly. Jack wants to apologize for the misstep, actually, but Lucius rallies so quickly there’s no good place to do it, so Jack just… keeps smiling. You can’t go wrong with a smile.

“What brings you down here?” Lucius says.

Jack glances up. “Bruce is driving me home,” he says. And then, hit with a burst of inspiration, “But it feels like I’m underfoot today, so I thought I’d take a walk around and make myself scarce. You have a second to give a guy a tour?”  
  
Lucius looks at him. Looks at him hard, and Jack is becoming belatedly aware of how suspicious he must sound when all at once Lucius gives him a shrug and plants his hand over the scanner.

“Alright,” Lucius says. “I don’t have a whole lot of time to squeeze you in, but you can have a look around if you like.”

The door rolls back to show something that reminds Jack, inanely, of a tire store. It’s got that rubber and grease smell, a room that looks darker than it is, light bouncing off the metal edges of cases all around. Jack darts into the thick of it before he can think twice, circling a display case at the center of the room which glows with blue electronic lights, a tower of folded metal behind glass.

“Ah,” Lucius says, somewhere behind him, “the turbine battery. Just the prototype, of course. The first gen model is on display at a conference in Europe at the moment….”

Lucius says it in a particular hanging sort of way, like maybe he’s waiting for Jack to ask more questions about it. But Jack wouldn’t even know where to start, and anyways he’s distracted by an actual tire on display at the back wall, over the sprawling holographic presentation table (which he ignores).

The treads are deep enough to hide several fingers and the circumference is enough to sit an eighteen-wheeler on, and there’s something elegant about the shape of it all that fills Jack with a delightful déjà vu. He runs his fingers over the swoop and curve of the treads. The display shelf is on eye level with him, and when he looks up into it like this, he can almost feel—

“That one’s a bit of a relic,” Lucius observes. “Military tech moves fast. That model is already obsolete.”

Jack traces the outline of a tred. “It was on the batmobile, wasn’t it,” he murmurs.

There’s a change in the air. It only lasts a second, but it startles Jack out of his revere. He draws back his hand like he’s afraid the rubber will burn him. When he turns to Lucius to apologize, though, Lucius looks the same as ever.  
  
“I don’t see how it could have been,” the man says, hands in the pockets of his lab coats.

“Right,” Jack says quickly, “sure, my mistake. I’ve never even seen the batmobile, come to think of it.”

Lucius gives him a strange look. “What are you interested in?” he asks, leaning against the projection table. “I could give you a pinpoint tour, if you don’t mind being in and out pretty quick.”

Jack furrows his brows, puzzling it over. “What, uh,” he says, “what is Bruce interested in?”

Lucius considers him for a moment, and then he crooks a finger for Jack to follow. He bustles over to a stacked shelf and digs out a scale model of a monorail car, which fills his arms like a big cat as he lifts it. “Bruce is always most interested in the city improvement projects,” Lucius says.

Jack takes it into his arms like it really is a big animal, holding it close, warm with sudden affection for his boyfriend. He pets the glass over the tiny windows. Again he thinks to himself, how could I have doubted him? What was I expecting?

“Do you have a background in engineering?” Lucius asks, as he reaches over and flicks the switch to make the little motor run. The wheels chug right along.  
  
“Not a bit,” Jack says, poking at the wheels. “Couldn’t wire my way out of a locked car.”

“Not _even_ a car? You seemed pretty familiar with the x29 tred.”

Jack pauses, in the middle of flicking the little model doors open and closed. “I dunno what I was thinking there. I just thought I remembered seeing it before.”

“Maybe some other military vehicle,” Lucius suggests. “We sold a lot of them five or six years back.”

“Maybe,” Jack says, thinking that the closest he’d ever been to a military vehicle was being kidnapped by Scylla and Charibdis months before. And he had no idea what that car looked like, because he’d been blindfolded.

No, the more he thinks about it, the more certain he is. He almost definitely remembers looking up into that tread pattern, like maybe—like maybe he was on the ground? Like maybe it almost ran him over? But the memory isn’t scary. It’s more like a happy memory. Like a Christmas morning memory. Not that he has any of those to compare it to.

“Anything else I can show you?” Lucius asks, which is funny because he’d seemed a lot more hesitant standing at the door five minutes ago.

Jack looks up at the ceiling, at the projector table, at the door to the back room. He feels kind of stupid for bothering Lucius now. How would he know what he was looking for in here, even if he found it?

“I’m good,” he says. “Thanks for your time, Bubelah. I know you got work to do.”  
  
Lucius takes the model from his arms when he offers it, and puts it away. “You know Bruce has had a fair number of girlfriends over the years,” he remarks, “but you’re the first person to come down here in the flesh.”

“Huh,” Jack says. “You’d think they woulda taken more of an interest.”

“Bruce knows which kinds of people take an interest,” Lucius says, with a meaningful look over his glasses.

“Yeah?” Jack says, not sure what he's supposed to be picking up here.

“Bruce might seem a bit carefree and spoiled,” Lucius says, “but he knows more than people think.”

“You sure you’re allowed to call your boss spoiled?” Jack says, uneasily.

“Come back any time,” Lucius says, pressing the button to open the heavy door. “But don’t expect to find anything.”

Jack inches out the door, not quite sure what direction this conversation has derailed in.

“And next time?” Lucius says. “Get a guest pass.”

The door slides shut.

 

 

 

“How many pairs of, _ha,_ handcuffs do you, pfff, own?”

Bruce side-eyes him from the other side of the bedroom. Jack keeps giggling as much because it’s funny as because he’s too wound up to be silent. He opens and closes his fingers inside the locked cuff. It glitters cold and silver in the rainy evening light pouring through the balcony window. He pulls against it. If he pulled hard enough, he imagines, it could cut a messy line through his arteries and bleed him right out, right onto Bruce's sheets. Empty him all across this beautiful king sized bed. 

He shivers. Those kinds of sudden bloody thoughts can’t hurt him here, safely closed away in Bruce’s home, with cuffs clipped tight around his wrists. He hopes.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Bruce asks.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Jack asks, licking his dry lips.

“Because you keep tugging on those,” Bruce says, nodding towards Jack’s wrist.

Jack pauses in the middle of rattling the left one. “Just testing the merchandise, darling.”

“Are you _sure_ you want me to get your ankle?”

The last set of cuffs swings from Bruce’s finger, flashing and glinting like something forbidden. Jack swallows automatically, unable to take his eyes away. “Yeah,” he says.

Bruce has barely unbuttoned his shirt, which is probably his tacit way of saying that he’s ready to stop any time he needs to, but all it’s doing right now is making Jack squirm against the sheets.  He wants Bruce big and powerful and strong over him, no more affected by anything Jack does than by a passing thought. They compromised on the one ankle. Jack was thinking about more, Jack has been thinking about this for months, Jack has thought about this every time Bruce laid those hands across his throat in the heat of the moment, when he was too far gone to remember that’s not how you should hold a lover. Every time sparks burst behind Jack’s eyes, deep in his fluttering lungs, he thought of this.

“ _Bruce_ ,” he says. “Come down here, darling, come down to me.”

Bruce plants a knee between Jack’s legs and leans down, running a hand through Jack’s hair, brushing it back off his forehead.

“You can pull that,” Jack says, pushing his head up into Bruce’s touch.

Bruce winds his fingers through Jack’s hair and clenches tight, watching Jack sigh and chew his lip. Jack tries to turn his face away from the intensity of it, but without saying anything, Bruce holds him firmly in place.

“You’re, uhah, pretty quick on the uptake, darling,” Jack says. One of his eyes is shut against the twist of pain, and it’s at least something between himself and Bruce’s unbreaking stare. It’s wonderful and terrible, an eclipse that should never be viewed with bare eyes.

“I love you,” Bruce says.

Jack jerks like he’s been slapped. His breath catches. It feels wonderful and terrible, eclipse dangerous. _You do?_ Jack wants to ask him, even though he he’s heard it before and he knows it, or he should know it. _Tell me again. Say it again._

“Sweetheart,” he manages, “please.”

“How do you want me to touch you?” Bruce asks, already moving his hand down the birdcage arc of Jack’s chest.

“Doesn’t matter,” Jack says. “However you want.”

Bruce snorts. “Thank you for that complete non-answer. Come on, Jack. Tell me what you want.”

It’s probably because Bruce chooses that moment to mercilessly squeeze the inside of Jack’s thigh that Jack loses his cool badly enough to say, “Tell—tell me again.”

Bruce pauses. “What do you want me to tell you?”

Jack rolls his eyes over to the safe darkness of the closet, where he can almost ignore Bruce watching him. “The,” he says, “the love thing.”

“I love you?” Bruce says, tilting his head.

Jack presses his lips together and nods.

“I love you,” Bruce says, and then with more certainty, “I love you.”

Jack shivers. He pulls tight on the cuffs, trying to ground himself here, in this moment, in this room. He thinks automatically about arteries and wet gushing cuts again, but it’s okay because Bruce is on top of him, holding him down—no matter what he thinks, it can’t get past Bruce. No matter what Jack wants or doesn’t want or doesn’t know if he wants, Bruce will hold him still, here, in place. All of it, the ugly and the confused and the dangerous, he can give it all up to Bruce.

“Again?” he whispers.

Bruce closes his fist around Jack’s cock, hot and tight. “I love you,” he says. He leans in, pressing a kiss to Jack’s lips. His grip is only a shade away from hurting, and Jack wants all of it. He wants everything. God, he wants everything, it’s eating him alive.

“Again,” Jack says.

“Love you,” Bruce says.

“Ah—again—”

 

 

 

Jack wakes up to the sound of Bruce shouting at Alfred. It’s a ways deeper into the house, but on a morning like this it’s so quiet inside the mansion that Jack, with his ever sharp ears, can still make out the muffled edges of it. He comes rolling out of bed and pulls on one of Bruce’s shirts without much thought, yawning. His sleepy morning autopilot is telling him to go to where the sound is. _It’s probably about me_ , he thinks, feeling more exhausted than he should after a whole six hours of uninterrupted sleep.

At the edge of the kitchen, Jack slumps against the door frame and gives everyone a bleary hello wave. “What’s the commotion?” he says, eyes drifting from the uneaten toast on the counter to Bruce’s pinched expression and crashing to a sudden halt on the stranger behind Alfred. The fumes of some uncomfortable and inscrutable moment drift over them all.

“Uh,” Jack says. He is very awake now. “Sorry—am I interrupting something?”

The man leaning at the counter gives him a bemused once-over, horn rimmed glasses slipping down over his nose. He has a boxy look to him, like somebody hung a sky-blue suit jacket on one of those football tackle dummies. Then he pauses, with his eyes over Jack’s chest, and shoots Alfred an urgent probing look. Alfred pressed his lips together and turns, deliberately, away. Some dire conversation is passing silently between them, far beyond Jack’s reckoning.

“I should go,” Jack says, all at once self-conscious about whatever it was the huge stranger was looking at. His shirt? Oh god, _Bruce’s_ shirt.

“It’s fine,” Bruce sighs. He slides his uneaten toast across the counter top, on a paper napkin of course because Bruce never has time for plates. “Mr. Kent, this is Jack. Like I was saying earlier, it might have been better to meet at the office. We weren’t expecting visitors.”

“I’m sorry for the intrusion,” Kent says. He sounds genuinely apologetic, and warm, and slightly Midwestern around the vowels. He turns his attention to Jack again. “I was just answering a call that your—boyfriend?”

Jack nods, heart pounding.

“That your boyfriend made earlier this morning. He’s looking to get back into an old business venture—?” This time Kent looks at Bruce for confirmation.

“Considering it,” Bruce says, carefully. “You don’t need to bore Jack with the details. We can talk about this later, in a more professional setting. Jack, you can go back to bed. I’ll be up in a moment.”

Jack lingers uneasily for a moment, watching the silent stalemate between Alfred and Bruce—their cat-rigid wariness—and Kent’s considering, almost sympathetic otherness. There’s something heavy in this room, something secret that no one wants Jack to be a part of. For a moment, Jack thinks, _he’s cheating on me._ But that thought is gone as soon as it appears. Bruce is too good for something like that, to honorable. It has to be something else.

“Right,” Jack says. “Okeedokie. I’ll just… go.”

It’s something about Wayne Enterprises, Jack is almost certain of it. It’s a secret that belonged to Bruce before the accident, the insects’ eggs floating just beneath the surface.

Jack shuffles back through the halls, running his fingers through his messy hair. But what could Bruce want so badly to keep from him? From Jack, of all people, who is hopelessly devoted—of all the people on this earth, _Jack,_ who would walk out into the desert and never be seen again if Bruce only were to ask him for it.

There’s a sound of throat clearing. Jack startles, twists to find Mr. Kent standing just a few feet behind him, looking apologetic.

“Sorry,” Kent says, with a wry shrug. “I’m told I’m pretty light on my feet for someone my size.”

Jack at least tries to look like he’s relaxed. The paranoia is butting in, with its own ideas about what is going on here, but- He reminds himself that this is Bruce’s house. Anyone who wants to take him away will have to go through Bruce first. Or at least—god, he _hopes_ so.

“You seem,” Kent says, and frowns as if he’s not quite sure what he means, “…happy here.”

“Well hey,” Jack says, sliding back a step, “who wouldn’t be?”

“He can’t stay like this forever,” Kent says. “You understand that, don’t you? We’ve all tried at one point or another, and it never works. And when it happens, I just want to know… what will you do?”

Jack’s paranoia abruptly switches directions. No, this isn’t someone here to commit him. This is someone here to undo his uneasy peace, to scoop those eggs up to the surface where they can finally suck their first greedy breaths. He runs his fingers through his hair and pulls them tight, curling in on himself.

“Why _can’t_ he?” Jack asks. “Why can’t we stay like this?”

“There are people who need us,” Kent says. He says it softly, like a parent to a distressed child. “At the end of the day, Bruce won’t be able to ignore people in need. Training or not, it isn’t in his nature. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“But—” Jack mutters, “but _I_ need him. I love him. Aren’t I enough?”

Kent stiffens. He draws back, and then he reaches forward, his hand hovering uncertainly in the dimness, in the sunlight leaking under the heavy closed doors, the dust never quite purged from the air. “Ah,” he says. “I think—I never understood what it was with him and you. I think I just got it.”

Jack looks up, from between his fingers. “You recognize me?” he says, surprised and not surprised. It seems like everyone knows him better than he knows himself.

“Obviously,” Kent says, lifting an eyebrow. He taps the space over his heart. “That’s familiar too, but your face hasn’t changed _that_ much _._ And I know all about familiar faces.”

Jack stops, slides his hand down his forehead, touches the skin beneath his eye with his fingertips. His face?

Kent sighs. “Part of me still thinks—for what you did to us, there at the end—there ought to be consequences.” He looks tired now, with his wide shoulders and his big unfashionable glasses and his model-perfect skin. “But you were always Bruce’s problem, and I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“You must have been friends,” Jack says, trying not to sound so jealous, “if he told you about me.”

Kent pauses. He narrows his eyes uncertainly behind his glasses. “ _If_ he—” Kent breaks off. “You know who I am, don’t you? The box, with the toxin—it was mailed to Clark Kent, I _know_ you know.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack says, “did you say I _mailed_ you—?”

“No, hold on,” Kent says, waving a hand. “Your heartbeat—are you telling me you actually don’t remember?”

“Bruce and I were in the same accident. Everything from before that is just… gone.”

Kent pulls back into himself. He cups a hand over his lips, brows pinched. Jack is just trying to catch up, trying to understand. So many people seem to know him, and yet, no one ever came forward. It’s been almost a year since the accident, and not a single person has come forward to claim him. He digs his nails into his arms, drawing red welts up through the pale skin. Bruce’s people seem to know him, but only tangentially—it’s as if he only existed in Bruce’s shadow. He feels like a ghost. He feels like a paper man.

“Do you _know?_ ” Kent says. He’s staring hard at Jack now, some deep but inscrutable emotion on his face. “Has anyone _told_ you?”

Jack’s vision starts to blur. He realizes belatedly that his body is shaking. He watches the expression on Kent’s face morph from apprehension to concern without understanding it, as the world goes hollow around him. Paper people. Paper house.

“I’m getting Bruce,” Kent says. Jack blinks and then he’s gone, and he doesn’t want to think about how he’s losing time now, too, but his brain won’t stop looping over and over, _you’re losing time you’re losing time_

Bruce races in ahead of Kent by several seconds, catches him around the back and pulls him in.

“I’m fine,” Jack says, teeth chattering, "I’m fine.“

Bruce pulls away just enough to look over his shoulder. "What did you say to him?” he demands, clutching the back of Jack’s head like he’s holding it together.

“I… don’t know,” Kent says. “I don’t think I understand anything about this.”

Bruce makes an irritated noise deep in his throat. Jack shies away from it automatically, but he's held tight, he has nowhere to move. "You should go,“ Bruce tells Kent. "Alfred will show you out.”

Kent winces, but he has enough grace to back away, retreating carefully from the scene. He gives Jack one last glance, regretful and confused, and then he ducks through the door and is gone.

“I can’t do this,” Jack mutters into Bruce’s shoulder, “I can’t keep….”

Jack buries his face in Bruce’s shoulder. He breathes in pajama shirt smell, fingers clutching at the fabric over Bruce’s shoulder blades, and thinks about what Kent said. They can't stay like this. They can't live like this.

There's only one path left to him. Jack looks up at the man he loves, has loved, will die loving. He can’t live like this. They can’t live like this. He has two options, and only one of them offers a chance of this life, the life Bruce is offering him. The other is always waiting for him, at the bottom of the river, and he hopes to god he never has to go back there again.

Bruce never ought to know about this. Bruce should carry on in the sunlight, unburdened with such awful things. Jack will take one more darkness into himself, back into himself, and hope that this will be enough to end it once and for all.

There are things he needs to know. He's ready to find out. He'll have to be.

  


	2. Day Star, Son of the Dawn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they'd never stand for it. Anyway, you're not looking at the bigger picture

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Chapter music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcdNleGMCdA). Shout out to gayliens who bought me dinner while I was working on this, what a mensch

The skyline of Gotham is gorgeous even in the bitter grey chill of winter, the chop of the bay sparkling with rare bursts of sunlight. Jack stands on the roof of the Wayne building and looks down at it all, hands in the pockets of his heavy wool coat. Wind whips at the tails of it, tugging his hair out of its deliberate coif, sinking chill fingers into his collar where a scarf would go if he owned one. He is white and the world is grey, and titanic, the scale of it breathtaking from this vantage point. 

What does he know?

Scarecrow recognized him. Scarecrow seemed to think he had fallen somehow, been reduced by his circumstances. A nobody like Jack. Where could he have fallen from that a creature like _Scarecrow_ would find it remarkable?

Far below him, the cranes are unloading cargo at the docks, toy sized crates from toy sized boats. What else does he know?

Alfred knew him. Alfred said he was toxic, intimately toxic. He hurt Bruce somehow. Who could he have been that he had the power to hurt a man like Bruce? Up until now he has been drawing away from the thought each time, like a thing that burns at the touch, afraid of what it meant. Would he have—could he have—?

The worst case scenario, the scene he can’t hold in his mind for more than a moment: a dimly lit room, his shape bearing down on Bruce’s helpless form, the whisper of—blackmail, perhaps, before the lamp light clicks off once and for all. Whatever secret Bruce’s past hides, perhaps it was not always such a secret to Jack.

But that doesn’t seem quite right either! Jack paces the length of the roof, kicking aside rusted keys and what look like broken batarangs, which he isn’t sure how he knows the look of but he clearly does. How does Scarecrow fit into it? Alfred and even Clark Kent, it would explain them, but it doesn’t explain Arkham’s most notorious doctor-turned-patient. 

Jack stops abruptly. He watches the white smoke rolling up from the factory to the east almost without seeing it. Had he been an inmate there at some point? But, then, where are his _records?_

The city is so huge and heavy against the earth. In the brief time he has tried to make a home of it, it has been like a body full of fever trying to burn him out. He has always thought of it as alien somehow, hostile to him as he walked its streets, but he has to admit… From up here, from this angle? With all the people reduced to shadows on the concrete, the alleys and secret corners exposed to the sky? It makes him almost nostalgic for something. It almost seems like home. 

There’s something he’s not seeing. If he could just go higher, he thinks, if there was a way to go a little higher—to look down at all of himself like an eye among the stars, like a figure in a photograph...

 

 

 

Jack rises to the morning light outside Bruce’s wide window, knowing that he can’t go home like this. His home will swallow him alive. He lays his head in the downy curve of a pillow and watches Bruce winch down the silk knot at his throat, grimacing at his reflection. That's the nicest suit Bruce owns short of an actual tux, and with the black shirt underneath it, his effect is as dour as the threat of snow over Gotham.

"Do you attend all your employees' funerals?" Jack asks him.

Bruce frowns, not at Jack but at the figure in the mirror and the burning grey sky behind him. "Technically I employ something like a fourth of the city, so unfortunately no, that would be impossible."

"You're sure you don't want company?" Jack asks, closing the eye that is squished against the pillow. "There's still time for me to put something nice on."

Bruce shakes his head. "You don't need to do that. It'll only make you feel worse."

Sadly, that's most likely true. Jack has never been to a funeral before, and the idea of looking down into that muddy pit in the earth—the suits and hats, the silent tears, all that  _black—_ fills his stomach with a shameful dread. But he  _wants_ to go, to be there for Bruce, the way Bruce always is for him.

"Besides which," Bruce says, grimly, "if it hadn't been for me, Scylla would never have been there."

Jack doesn't know if  _that's_ true or not. Scylla seems to be a kind of creeper vine groping up through the city these last couple months, as relentless as she is inscrutable. Cops can't keep her out. Robins can't keep her down. It's true that she only strikes places connected with Bruce, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily  _him_ she cares about. It could just be his money, or his company, or any number of things which would remain in place if Bruce Wayne CEO was changed out for some other warm body. It's unfortunate that people keep getting caught in the crossfire, but Bruce's fault that does not the thing make. 

Bruce comes over and bends down at the edge of the bed, pressing a kiss into Jack's messy hair. Jack lifts his hand, fingertips lingering over the classical edge of Bruce's square jaw, the freshly shaved skin. With his dark hair, Bruce's face will show a 5 o'clock shadow well before noon, but you wouldn't guess it right now. 

"I love you," Jack says. "I wish I could show it better."

Bruce closes his hand over Jack's, smiling faintly into the touch. "If you loved me any harder I think you might emit radio waves."

Jack brightens. "I could give it a try."

After Bruce is gone, Jack is left alone in the bedroom watching the grey winter sky, the smile slowly falling away from his lips. He should lie back down and try to catch up on his sleep deficit; the only time he ever seems to sleep well is when he stays over at the mansion. But he's been here for a couple days now and his body is used to scraping by with far less, and he is restless. All of his questions, all of his worries—alone in the grey silence of the magnificent old bedroom, they are crawling inevitably towards him. 

Instead, he moves quietly through the mansion, laying new eyes on the endless hallways, some of them familiar, some of them not. He inspects every photograph, of which there are precious few. The one of Bruce with the little black-haired boy. Grayson, Jack now assumes. The enormous portrait of the late Waynes, overlooking the parlor with ghostly benevolence. He spends a long time considering Martha Wayne’s mysterious little smile. He feels that she knows something, something sad. The kind of sad that you just have to laugh at.

It must be a pain to dust in here. The old boy’s not as spry as he used to be. Why don’t they hire a maid to do all that, it’s not as if they don’t have the money. Right?

Jack runs his hands over the cool marble skull of some philosopher he’ll almost certainly never be able to name. His fingers itch too, now, with the same suppressed panic that has been building in him for a day now. What is he looking for? Will he know it when he finds it?

Underneath the splashes of new life in this room, there are the dusty underpinnings of the Bruce who lived here before the accident. Delicate velvety bodies of bats tacked down under glass, wings splayed for analysis. Obscure texts by long dead scientists. Jack looks again to the Mona Lisa smile of Martha Wayne, searching for some answer in her spectral face. The Bruce of before strikes him as a kind of Byronic figure, forever pacing the walls of this gloomy parlor. He grows monolithic and strange in his seclusion. In his sadness. Jack can sure imagine where that sadness might come from. Maybe the R&D papers can tell him nothing that Martha's strange smile cannot. Maybe there’s nothing behind Bruce but this sadness.

He lifts his fingers. Maybe he is imagining it all. A cold uncertainty runs through him, as he overlooks the room. Maybe all he’s sensing is his own guilt crystalizing between them, growing stronger with each person who seems to know more about him than he knows about himself. He drops into the chair behind the desk, groaning, and spins absently.

As he drifts to a stop, he spots a business card wedged underneath one of the eccentric little paperweights. It’s Kent’s. He’s a journalist, Jack knows now, which explains how he knew just the wrong things to say. As he picks it up, Jack eyes the half-open door to the parlor. Bruce clearly didn’t want him involved in whatever Kent is investigating, but every instinct is screaming at him that these things are one and the same—Bruce’s secrets, his vague warnings, Kent’s connection to them both.

Jack pockets the card before he can convince himself not to, and quickly leaves the parlor behind.

 

 

 

Alfred drove Bruce to the funeral. Jack knows this, and yet he tiptoes through the house as if the wrong creak on the ancient floorboards will summon the old boy from nothing. In the kitchen, thinking of Bruce frowning behind the counter, all their tense ghosts looming over cheerful yellow cabinets, Jack pulls down the phone from the wall and punches in Kent’s number.

He doesn’t pick up on the first ring. Jack doesn’t know why he expected that--most people wouldn’t--but he wraps the old rubber phone cord around his fingers in nervousness anyhow. Each coil obscures a little more of his knuckle, until the skin is gone entirely from view. He hates making calls.

A click. “This is Clark Kent,” the familiar baritone says.

Breath whooshes out of Jack’s chest like it’s got a mind of its own, and for a moment he really cannot speak. Kent doesn’t hang up, or say anything actually. He just waits patiently, like he’s used to this kind of thing. Maybe he is. Maybe this is just something that happens with journalists. 

Jack swallows. “Hey, there, uh. This is Jack, from the… kitchen, the other morning.”

Silently squeezing the hell out of the phone cord, Jack wonders what the _fuck_ is wrong with him.

There’s a little airy sound, but he doesn’t know what it means. “Oh,” Kent says, pretty neutral sounding. “Hello again. I’m sorry if I made things difficult for you and Bruce. I was under a… mistaken assumption, at the time.” 

Jack sinks an incisor into his lip. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he says. 

There’s a pause from Kent’s end, and then something that is definitely a sigh. “I don’t think Bruce would like me to discuss this with you right now,” he says. “I should go.”

“No no no,” Jack says, hunching over the countertop, clutching the receiver with both hands. “Don’t, please. I know something was going on, okay, please, besides Alfred so far I’ve had two people say they knew me before and one of them was a _supervillain,_ Mr. Kent, and the other one was you. I don’t understand. I need to understand.”

“You need to,” Kent says, slowly.

Jack gestures erratically at the air, for all the good it will do him. “You said that we can’t live like this forever and you were _right_ , you were right, something has to give. Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night I can almost feel the terrible thing getting ready to hatch—I can feel it in my bones. Scratching. I’m tired of living in fear, Mr. Kent.”

“Do you know who I am?” Kent asks him, after a moment.

“No,” Jack says, wretchedly. “A writer? I’ve never read your column.”

“Do you know who Bruce is?”

That one Jack takes longer to answer, running his tongue over the sharp edge of his teeth. In a way he feels as if he does know--the shape if not the name, at least. The monster that lurks beneath the surface, like and unlike the monster which lives beneath Jack’s own bed. “Isn’t being Bruce enough?” he asks.

“Look,” Kent says, gently, “it’s not my place to tell you any of this. Maybe you have a right to know your own secrets, but your secrets are all tangled up with everyone else’s.”

“But,” Jack says.

“You’re not an island, Jack, no matter how much you may feel like one right now. Your life is wound up in the lives of more people than you can possibly know.”

“That can’t be right,” Jack says, slumping onto his elbows. “I’m nobody. I was born nobody.”

A small sound, like a pen being capped. “John Doe,” Kent says, “in my experience, there’s no such thing as a nobody.”

Jack looks down at his shadow on the milky white tile. 

“Take a step back,” Kent advises him. “I often find when I’m stumped on a story that my problem is perspective. Pull back the camera, but don’t lose sight of the bodies in the rubble.”

 The bodies in the rubble. John looks up, at the refrigerator, where one of his doctor’s appointment reminders hangs from the magnets. When had he made himself so much a part of this house? When did he become part of anyone else’s life?

“Please,” he says, softly. “Please, Mr. Kent. If I have sins to atone for, don’t I deserve to know what they are?”

There’s a tense moment of consideration, a held breath. It sounds like he’s chewing on something, maybe a pen. The sun that pours in through the east window is hot across Jack’s hunched shoulders.

“You were the Joker, John. You do know who that is, don’t you?”

In the perfect, white hot silence that follows, Jack is a fracturing mirror, blood on glass, a thousand nauseous eyes blinking in simultaneity as they crack and spill across his mind. He looks up, into the black reflection of the microwave door, which is the oldest appliance in the kitchen and which he _knows_ will burn popcorn if you put it in on the popcorn setting and how could _he_ , how could _that_

No. No, but also—yes, he can see it now, the ghost of that smile on his own face, a hundred mornings with a kerchief pressed to his face to avoid the uneasy looks of strangers in the shop. Newsreels, pop psych pieces on the afternoon news, posters outside the precinct. Their eyes are the same.  

He reaches out, but his fingers can’t reach the dim reflection of his own pale eyes.

Kent said toxin, he _did_ say that, and Jack didn't know what to do with that word so he put it away, but that _was_ the word. Scarecrow—well of course Scarecrow would know him, and there would _be_ no records, there had never _been_ any records of... 

“Are you still there?” Kent asks him, like he’s testing the waters in a dangerous reef.

“Yes,” Jack says, mouth dry. “I’m—I’m trying to understand.”

Kent sighs. “Under normal circumstances, I’d rather not throw this at Bruce while so much is in the air, but… look, you need to talk to him about this. It’s a conversation that needs to happen. Before he goes any further.”

Did Bruce know? Could he have known the whole time? But how would he know, and why would—why would Clark _Kent_ know? None of this is coming together the way he thought it would, this is so much worse than not knowing anything. What would be worse, if Bruce already knows, or if Jack has to _tell_ him?

“Yes,” Jack says, “yes I—I think we should talk.”

 

 

 

 Jack takes the elevator up to Bruce’s floor of the Wayne Building. People come and go like flurries of birds rising up around his feet, faceless and voiceless, as he stands silent in the middle of it all. In the course of a morning he’s crossed over from acute anxiety to tranquil, distant nothingness. He is a ghost in his own body, watching his feet step out of the elevator, his shoes cross gash in the floor which is so slim but so so deep, deep enough that you could remember a whole lifetime in the time it would take you to fall its length, if you had a lifetime to remember.

He is vaguely aware that he should be trying to figure out what to say to Bruce, but he cannot think of anything. Nothing. For the first time since he woke up nerve-wracked and heart-spiking in that hospital room last year, his mind is silent. And then, like the static sound flooding back into a broken speaker, he’s shaken back to life.

The building rattles under his feet. Jack skids across the hardwood, hands grabbing at nothing, as smoke that smells faintly of pancakes billows up through the elevator doors behind him. What? He rushes to the nearest window and peers down, through more smoke, to find glass on the street. An attack. What time is it? What time was the funeral supposed to end? If Bruce is back, already, or would he have stayed behind to shake hands? Would he have come straight back?

The hallway blurs around Jack, the sound of his heart in his ears, or his heels on the floor, incomprehensible. He throws open the door to the private section, where Bruce's office is, and races through the hall. Empty thank god. This high off the ground they don't have many options, the elevator is probably already crowded with people on the lower floors, and the stairwell, yes, but it's a long way down-

Jack bursts into the perfect silence of Bruce's office. Through the panorama window, he can see smoke curling up and away, pale and meaningless. Not a single paper is ruffled on the wide desk, not a paperweight out of place. Jack sags, into the doorframe, and lets himself discard the fear which gripped him most. Bruce isn't back yet. Whoever they are, they haven't even gotten here. 

Jack ghosts across the floor of the office, gloves brushing lightly against the photograph of himself and Bruce under the silver lights of that charity Gala, as the building shakes beneath him. The frame wobbles and he steadies it with one finger, automatically. In a moment he'll take the stairwell down to safety. In a moment-

He feels more than hears the doors to the floor wrenched open. He turns, alone against the white length of window, and looks into the enormous green eyes of a familiar monster. They blink, sideways shuttering, in the frame of the doorway.

"Gree-ting-s," she says, her voice like a stone dropped into a well, whispery and improbably deep. "I remem-ber--you."

Jack sways, like a dreamer who cannot wake, and watches the slow catlike twitch of her endless corded muscles. He feels his mouth opening. "Good afternoon, Madam," he says. "I'm afraid Bruce isn't back yet."

Because there is nowhere to go, and because Jack is a creature of manners, when Scylla's jackbooted crew arrive to tear the room apart, Jack stands aside and waits. It's not clear what they're searching for, knocking over busts and ripping books from the shelves, but they are entirely uninterested in the papers across the desk or even the very expensive art hung over the walls. In the whirlwind of destruction Scylla finally arrives, teeth even more gruesome than Jack remembers chalk-painted over the black mirror of her helmet. She surveys the room at military attention, standing so still that the yellowed teeth sewn into the hem of her leather jacket don't even click against each other. Mostly, they don't _look_ human. Small mercies.

She presses the palm of her hand to her visor and pulls it away, revealing a face that claws Jack's belly with nausea. He pressed himself against the window glass, sinking his teeth into his gloves, and tries to breathe deep. It's not just disgust. Jack is a butcher, he's seen meat and muscle at every stage of undress.

The flesh of her cheeks is eaten away in blackened vignettes, revealing the pearly molars underneath, flashing out from the shadow, perfect as a doctor's display. It's not just disgust that makes him feel as if he is seeing double, two visions overlaid and pushing through each other—it's the facsimile of a smile, the tortured fleshless grin. It is Wrong.

"You," she says. He looks up and realizes he's made a spectacle of himself, cringing away from her like a child in a freak show. "You were at the Gala."

Well now that’s all coming back fresh and shiny in his memory. Jack tugs his collar, wincing. "No hard feelings about the whole shooting you thing, I hope?"

She doesn't look at him any particular kind of way. "I had forgotten," she says.

"Oh," Jack says. "Good?"

She comes over to him. Up close he can see that she's got one of those faces that look tired no matter what you do to them, permanent dark circles under her bare eyelids. She takes him by the face, hard and impersonal. She looks back at the photograph on the desk, the champagne and silver night of the Gala, before everything went wrong—in the photo you can just see the tight edge to Jack's smile, as he anticipates the wreckage the night will leave in its wake.

"The lover," she says, as if she has finally remembered something. "Where is your gun, lover boy?"

Jack's hand closes over the hard shape in his pocket, and he wonders if it would do him any more good this time than it did him last time. He's close enough, he could get it into her stomach and probably _probably_ pull the trigger before she could knock it out of his hands. She may assume he's unarmed, because he hadn't tried anything when the enormous creature poked her head through the door earlier.

She grins at him. It's sickening.

"What do you think," she calls out, eyes flicking back for a fraction of a second. "Charybdis?"

Through the door, Jack can just make out the massive shape of a knee folded up, as the monster rests her considerable bulk against the other side of the wall. There's a faint jangling, bangles jostling each other on her wrists and ankles, and then Charybdis says, "Take--him."

Jack's hand moves. The flat of a hand cracks over his wrist, the smell of gunpowder, ears ringing as the blast obliterates all sound but the shrill whine of silence, plaster blows out in a cloud: all of these things in a single moment, and then Jack is lying disarmed on the floor, with his arm wrenched up behind his back. He screws his eyes shut as Scylla digs her steel toe into his spine.

"Pretty fast," she says. "Not fast enough."

Jack sweats and grits his teeth, knots of carpet digging up into his cheek. "You're not gonna get any money out of this," he manages, "this is Gotham. The robins will come for you." His breath stutters as his shoulder gives a shrill throb of pain. "Bruce," he gasps, "will come for you."

He doesn't know why he says it. What could Bruce do against a small army like this one, even as smart and as strong as he is, what could any one man do here? And anyway, why should Bruce do anything himself when there are people he could send instead? But Jack has sat in the darkness with Bruce, in the cavern darkness below the earth, and he has lifted Bruce from the collapsing tunnel wreckage of that same darkness, and he has seen the way Bruce grows to fill that fearful space. In his bones, he knows that Bruce will come.

For a moment Scylla says nothing. Then, as the cold click of handcuffs close around Jack's wrist, and the pain in his shoulder dissipates, she says, "Good". She drags him up by the collar, unwavering grip even as he slips and stumbles, disoriented. She marches him out, past her militia, and holds him out to Charybdis.

"Will you carry him, please?" she asks.

Charybdis reaches out with one of her terrible claws, palm as wide as Jack's middle, and closes her whole hand around him. Her nails press into his spine.

Jack licks his lips nervously. "Isn't," he says, "uh, isn't Scylla supposed to be the monster?"

Scylla doesn't spare him a backwards glance as she fits her visor back into place, the rows of chalk teeth like the inside of a shark's jaws, concentric gaping circles. Charybdis draws him in, stronger than gravity but almost gentle, and gives him a look that could be mistaken for a smile.

"She--is."

 

 

 

To his surprise, when the bag comes off his head, they are back in the caverns beneath Gotham. The darkness isn't so bad after having a bag over his head--which was plastic, and scared the hell out of him before he realized they weren't trying to suffocate him after all. Other than that the ride was pretty uninteresting. He talked to the guard about his plans for the weekend. Made a list of his favorite black and white films. Had a hysterical breakdown when he remembered what he was right in the middle of ranking _Sunset Boulevard_.

The vault of the cavern is high above him, dim with light from the lanterns across the walls. It must be a different one though, because he doesn't see any of the damage from months ago scarred into its stone. Scylla pays him no attention as she sweeps through the bustle, none of the enormous motherboards of the previous site but plenty of crates being carried in and out.

Charybdis, comfortable on her palms and bent legs like a strange ape, folded into the tight space here, nudges Jack forward.

"So what's your story, Carrie," he asks her, as she hooks a nail into the back of his coat and lifts him over a shadow that turns out to be a deep divot in the stone. "You seem like a girl who has a past."

"Charybdis is older than you will ever be, Lover-boy," Scylla says, without turning from the manifesto she is checking off item by item. "Her story is the story of temples brought down around the ears of boys like you."

"Really," Jack says, craning his neck to look back at her. "You're pretty fit for your age, darling."

"I was born--to swallow the bones--of the here--tic."

"Yeesh," Jack says. "Fun little atmosphere you all have going here."

They pass by a dark chamber, and as the lantern passes, light tangles in a kind of dark smoke just beyond the entry way. It reflects slithering light back up at them, a sly flicker in the depths. Charybdis catches him rubbernecking and firmly pushes him onward. He gives a little _oof_ and stumbles.

"So this is a kind of cult?" Jack asks. They're awfully tightlipped around here. If he was running an operation of this size, he'd be _excited_ to talk about it.

"It absolutely is not," Scylla says sharply. "We are a coalition of likeminded individuals working together to rectify what has been wronged in the natural order. And we offer a living wage."

Jack nods, thoughtfully. "So this is like a... justice kind of thing, then? Take out the one percent and let the folks at the bottom get a little of the sunshine?"

Scylla snorts. "It's none of our concern who has or doesn't have _sunshine._ Too much is at stake to worry about such small lives."

"Oh," Jack says. He knows he sounds disappointed. If it was something like that, some kind of radicalized social justice situation, he knows Bruce could negotiate through that. Bruce would be _sympathetic_ to that. "I think you lost me," he says.

Charybdis makes a soft noise behind him. "Show--him," she says, "the Plouto-nion."

Scylla stops entirely and whirls, pulling her visor free. "Show _him?_ " she says. "This little pawn? This pale little nothing? You want to show _him?_ "

Charybdis crouches forward, above Jack, and slips her monstrous finger under his chin. She tips his face so it catches the light in a different way, the curve of her thumb cradling the back of his skull. He stands very, very still in her grip.

"I know--him--" she says, "I can--smell the terror--in him."

Jack gives Scylla an apologetic look. "I'm really not that frightened," he tells her. "Lamentably, I have a skewed sense of priorities."

Scylla sets the manifesto down on a crate nearby and says, "That's not what she means.”

The apologetic smile freezes and cracks, and Jack cannot move. “Oh,” he manages.

Scylla sets off and flicks her fingers back at them, summoning them along in a brusque military sort of way. “Come on. Let's do this fast."

They move down deeper into the caverns, leaving behind even the dim reassurance of the militia's glowing work lights. Now there is only the lantern in Scylla's hand, barely enough to see the walls by, and the phosphorescence of Charybdis' ancient mad eyes.

The whole place reminds Jack of the entrance to the underworld, those caverns in Turkey where a long time ago people thought the goddess of spring was whisked away into the land of the dead. He knows a lot of weird stuff like that, although it wasn’t in any of the books in Bruce’s library or even in a magazine delivered to him by accident, as it happens sometimes. He knows things about old dead Greeks and he knows things about medieval kings and he knows things about the temperature at which bone burns, which was a worrying thing to know even before he knew how he knew it. Now it terrifies him.

If they're not here to topple society and set right the wrongs of the last century, Jack really doesn't know what Scylla and Charybdis all _are_ here to do. It's at least sorta religious, and at least a little terroristic. What they want with his boyfriend the billionaire is anyone's guess. Probably not money though. But if not money then—

Scylla halts at the carved opening to the final chamber, a leering weathered face chipped out of the stone above the door. That same ominous smoke twists through the darkness. She pops open the side of the lantern and reaches inside, pulling live fire from the pit of it, tongues of flame licking at her leather glove. She balls up her fist, and like a pitcher winding up at the plate, flings the light deep into the cavern.

"The mandate of heaven," she says, flicking the weak residue of flame from her fingertips. "The correct order of things."

Red erupts inside the darkness, swallowing the very thickness of the air, blinding and unearthly and impossible. For a moment the air glitters and sparks with a light that consumes itself, and then in the lurid glow that remains, ash floats to the cavern floor.

"Empires rise and fall," Scylla says. "Kings have their designated time upon the earth. History demands something of us all."

It isn't so much a vision as it is a dread understanding that rises from the smokeless cavern, like a creeping awareness. There are terrible things out there, in the darkness between the stars, in the abysses of the earth, in the hearts of men. There are abominations that must never see the light of the sun. Whatever can be done to stop this—whatever can be done to hold the line against the dissolution of all things, a figure more terrible than chaos and more infinite than evil—

Jack finds his feet drifting forward, over the stone, as if the fingers of fire licking out towards him have caught him and lifted him, hungry to taste him. It wants him, it _knows_ him.

Scylla's arm thwacks across his chest, startling tears from his eyes. "Cross that threshold," she says, "and you will regret it. A thing like you?" She looks down her nose at him, with her sunken eyes and pitted cheeks. "A thing like you would be burnt to ashes."

 

 

 

There was a day a month or two before, when Jack woke up to find Bruce's bedroom empty.

It was a strange feeling, to be alone in that vast silken darkness, in that huge bed. He remembers that the stars were just visible through the balcony window, holding their thousands of tiny breaths at the approach of the dawn. In his bare feet, with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, Jack shuffled out into the halls. It seemed like such a long time, wandering, half asleep and half awake. There was a light on in one of the far bedrooms, where the antique furniture was draped in endless white sheets.

The unseen course of the night had pulled a book from a mostly empty shelf, leaving a dark square in the dust. Bruce's head hung over the table, fingers buried in his hairline, and there was such a sadness there. It seeped out of him, soaked the edges of his body.

Photos, Jack remembers. Photos he hadn't seen before, probably that Bruce hadn't either until that night. A circus. A river. Grinning children in a line, a school fieldtrip, and a boy on the shoulders of a man who was clearly Bruce, although he seemed older somehow, despite the fact that it must have been so many years ago—a decade even.

Jack's heart sank. The old Bruce might have been the scrapbooking type, for all he knew, but that handwriting in the messy margins was not Bruce's by a long shot.

He could have gone back to bed. It wasn't any of his business. But you can't just see the man you love looking like that, slumped and silent in his own lightless home, and not want to do _something_.

Jack took his hands. Jack lifted him up from that chair, from that dusty tomb, and brought him up to the balcony, where the first light of morning was breaking over the city far away. He remembers drinking coffee in the dawn, hands clutched tight with Bruce's, and he remembers more than anything how much love can live even in sadness. How much hurt can be softened just by the feeling of a hand in yours.

If he had never known Bruce—if he had never loved Bruce—he would never have learned that.

In Scylla's cavern cell, Jack leans his head back against the stone wall and watches lamplight flicker across the heavy earth. There are so many thoughts that circle him, flashing their eel sharp teeth as he sits alone under the weight of everything he is, but he holds onto this moment. He holds onto it with both hands.

This place feels like the tomb of that dusty bedroom, and more than anything, he wants Bruce to find him and bring him back up into the lavender wash of dawn.

 

 

 

When the first explosion wracks the cavern, Jack sits up from his slump at the wall. The guard at the door is paltry, because he's unarmed and honestly Scylla probably thinks he couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag, which is untrue but not entirely unfair. Jack comes up to where the two of them are standing and leans against the stone, unnoticed. They're muttering between themselves, guns pulled tight against their chests, wondering if the boss needs help. Not, they take pains to affirm to each other, because they don't want to be down here alone with the ploutonions, but because you remember what happened the last time these costumed assholes got into our stuff, how much tech we lost?

Jack stretches discretely. He's sure not gonna be the weak link in this escape, which is entirely for his own benefit. Jeeze, he's really gonna have to make this up to Bruce. He’s gonna have to…

His stomach rolls with dread. How can he ever make up for all the trouble he's dragged Bruce through, not even considering today? Where would he even start? How can he ever—? Everything he is, has been, how could he ever be worth

Jack drags his hand over his face, trying to put a pin in that downward spiral before it gets too deep. This is not the time to travel that well worn road. There _will_ be time later to tear himself apart, if he can just keep it together for a little longer.

Pebbles rattle against the floor. He sees the boot before he sees the rest of the Robin, crashing heel first through the air, and then Jack is twisting aside to let the guard fly past him. There's a heavy thump as man and armament hit the floor behind him. The second guard goes for his gun, but the barrel is too long and his reflexes are too slow: he goes flying right after his comrade into the makeshift cell.  

The Robin, unmistakably Damien, pats dust from his gloves. "You're a lot of trouble," he says, pinning Jack with a narrow look.

_How could he ever how could he_

Jack winces. "I try not to be," he says, absolutely despairing of his whole existence.

Damien turns abruptly, with a little _tchh_ noise. "It's fine," he says. "Apparently, you're worth it."

 _Have you talked to Bruce about me_ , Jack wants to ask, but he knows it’s not the right time, and even if he wanted to, Damien is already several paces ahead of him.

Above them, in the higher chamber, the byword is chaos. It's not as clean as it was last time, with the lights cut and the ceiling collapsed. The room is full of smoke from some kind of flashbang, and between the reduced visibility and the close quarters Jack can see why very few of Scylla's people are using firearms. It's hard to tell which way the tide is rolling. Some of the Robins are indisputably better at hand to hand combat than the militia, but some of them... some of them less so.

"Where's Bruce?" Jack shouts, absolutely certain that Bruce will be here, regardless of how he managed it.

Damien's pace flags for a moment, just as he raises his grappling gun towards the pandemonium ahead. "See for yourself," he says, with a satisfaction that Jack doesn't understand and finds a little frightening.

After Damien has shot off into the fray, he edges into the chamber, trying to stay low. It would be deeply unfortunate to get hit with a stray bullet at this stage in the game. Bruce, he thinks, Bruce must be somewhere nearby. Maybe up at the mouth of the cavern? Maybe providing logistical support, he wouldn't be able to resist getting involved somehow, he's never been one to stand by when work needed doing—

Scylla stumbles out of the smoke, a tranq gun heavy in her fist. She laughs, ragged and wild, and the curve of her black visor is cracked like a spiderweb. "Yes!" she shouts, "Finally! _Finally!_ Was that all it took?"

"Drop the gun," says a low voice, almost a rumble, from beyond the fog. It sends a shiver up Jack's spine, a thrill as delicious and pure as the first time Bruce pulled him down into his lap, in the back of the limo, in the secret dark. The feeling is hot and automatic, almost animal. Jack takes a step forward before he knows what he's doing. He knows that voice, he knows it...

There is a pop of gunpowder somewhere further away, and in its wake the dust and smoke whip away from them all, like the edge of the cloak which whips out from around the figure before them, a figure Jack knows, a figure that he could never mistake. Jack clutches a hand over his mouth, afraid of his own ragged breathing.

"Is that all it took!" Scylla screams, hysterical with glee now, "is that all I had to do!? You weak-hearted bastard, was that _all I had to do?"_

Batman advances through the smoke, all his grey and black edges almost lost in the darkness. "Drop the gun _now_ ," he says. "Surrender and minimize your losses, Scylla. You can still lose so much more."

Every nerve in Jack's body _screams_. The overpass, the streetlamp, that night on the park bench—that voice that voice that _voice_ —inside Jack's ribcage there is light that burns him and consumes him and it flares to howling life at the sound of that _voice_.

"Bruce," he rasps.

Bruce's head snaps towards him, everything but the slight startled parting of his lips obscured by plastic and Teflon and opaque glass. It only lasts a moment. The beginning of a breath. But it's long enough for Scylla to raise her gun and fire off a shot that cracks through the weak joint at the neck of the armored suit. He falls back a step, gauntlet lifting to the site of the breach, fingers not quite touching the glittering end of the dart.

No. That’s not…

Scylla heaves her gun aside, and it cracks horribly against the ground. "No!" she shouts, "No, this isn't right! You didn't do it _right!_ You can't just put on the suit and expect to be the bat! You're still just a rich little boy playing dress up!"

Bruce staggers. Scylla turns and in a single ruthless movement she hooks her elbow around Jack's neck. His breath seizes in his throat.

"You coward!" she says, "You won't die for him, then? You're not willing to die?"

She drags him back into the downward sloping hall, moving too fast for his heels to keep up—she's dragging him bodily by the throat, his whole weight pinned in the crook of her arm as he fumbles at her grip. Pressure throbs in his sinuses. His tongue flattens up into the back of his mouth and he can't breathe, he can't breathe at all like this, how is she so _strong?_

In his swimming vision he can see the shape that comes after them, the flare of wings, and he wants to reach out for it but it's all he can do to keep Scylla from choking him to death in the course of their relentless descent. He hits the stone without ceremony, flung gasping onto his stomach, and as he looks blearily up into the darkness he sees the shape of that grinning ancient face carved above them. The air around them is acrid with the overflow of whatever poison gas lies beyond the chamber door.

Scylla fumbles with the lantern hooked to her belt, and then the cave erupts into fire red as blood, red as _emergency_ in the dark. She grabs Jack by the collar and drags him up to his knees, pointing into the cannibal glow.

"Coward!" she shouts. "Here is your last chance to redeem yourself! There is no place in this world for Bruce Wayne, you coward! Every day that you live is another day that this world goes unprotected from the darkness! The bat cannot live while you still wear his body like a bad suit!"

Jack looks up into the darkness. That is the shape of the man he loves, he would know it with or without the ears, any time, any place. This has all gone so terribly wrong, and the worst part is that part of him—part of him _sings_ with it, with understanding. So this was the monstrous thing that Bruce was holding back from him, the dark shape beyond the curtain, the nightmare that answers Jack's endless blue-green nightmares. It's beautiful. He almost wants to weep with how beautiful it is, all its gargoyle shapes and brutal promises.

Everything else is blown clean and pure from his mind at this final gut punch of understanding.

Scylla shakes Jack, like a kitten, as the fire rages behind them. "You can't have it both ways!" she shouts.

"Let him go Scylla," Bruce says, only a hit of a sway betraying his steady approach.

"Always," Scylla says, voice ragged with screaming, "always _always_ Bruce must die so that bat can live. If you won't do it for yourself, then I will do it for you."

Bruce is nearly on them now, a flash of something pale showing through the breach in his suit. He squares his shoulders, despite the crack in his armor, ready to make his stand. "If you hurt him," he starts.

Scylla lifts Jack to his feet like he weighs nothing, and she holds him just at the edge of the chamber entrance, where the tongues of fire lick at his heels like hungry cats. "I _will_ hurt him," she says. "I will obliterate him. I will cast him into the fire and he will join the thousands of dead sparrows before him, unless you take his place!"

Bruce halts. His jaw is working, under the sharp edges of the mask, and it's a look that Jack knows from various banal moments in the long domestic dream that comprises their life together all these months. A kitchen. A garden. "If," he says. "If I—if I die. You'll let him live?"

"Oh Brucie," Jack whispers, "sweetie, no. No no no. You can't do that."

"It's not so bad to die," Scylla says, more gently now. "You've done it before."

"That's what you want from me," Bruce says, a hint of a question in his voice. "Just to die?"

"Not _just_ ," Scylla says, "to die. To be reborn. Beyond this door is the fire of truth, the mandate of heaven. What you are meant to be, what history requires of you, it will restore. You cannot live this half life any longer, shirking the call of duty, feigning ignorance. This is what history requires of you."

“How can you claim to know,” Bruce says, “what history requires of _me?”_

"Anyone with eyes can see a pattern," Scylla says. "And I have eyes beyond eyes, as many eyes as there are stars in the sky..."

A flash of green catches Jack's attention. At the mouth of the hall, above them, twin phosphorescent pinpoints fall on their frozen drama. His heart hammers in his chest. Once Charybdis arrives, there won't be any chance for Bruce. She's too big, and he's too inexperienced, and Scylla already has her bargaining chip—him—well in hand. They're all at the end of their grand act, now, one way or another.

Bruce is wavering. He shouldn't be wavering, not for Jack's sake, but he _is._ Jack can see it clearly, in the fall of his hand, in the movement of his jaw. His beautiful darling Bruce, always trying to put himself between Jack and the bullets of the world, always throwing himself on the world's unsheathed knives.

There’s no way Bruce can know what Jack is. He’s sure of it now. But Jack—for the first time Jack knows what he is, and more than that he knows what _Bruce_ is. Bruce is goodness. Bruce is the only respite left in this world, the only kind face, the only soft touch. He deserves his peace, in a way that Jack has never deserved even the drops of it that spill over Bruce’s cup and into his.

Here is the truth, which Jack has known since that night on the lawn with Alfred's quiet condemnation ringing in his ears, since that night on the park bench, since that night at the overpass: he would kill to protect this Bruce, this Bruce who is warm and hopeful and _his_ , of all the things on this earth the only thing that is _his._

He's always known this moment was coming. Now that it arrives, it is a relief. Cleaner than a gun to the chin, than a suicide in a pond somewhere. Never in a thousand years will he be able to pay back the trouble that he's been, or the love that he's drunk down with endless thirst, or the unremembered evil that shadows his back, but he _can_ do this. He's ready.

Bruce steps forward, chin up, breath deep—

Jack relaxes in Scylla's grip, and he smiles at Bruce, and he lets himself fall back into the light.

 

_It burns, it burns like_

the burn of cherry cola breaking across your tongue, the burn of acid raging over your skin, I've loved you loved you loved you in a thousand fractal infinities and I—

if he could scream he would scream or maybe he already is

—love you here, in the nothing beyond the place that burns and burns where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth—

Jack heaves a breath that scours his insides, distantly aware that he is on his knees before the raging fire, gloved fingers clutching his face. In the flame, towering green before him, he sees a reflection of himself. It is him but it isn't him, in its cheap black suit and its soaking hair, but when he tries to make out any more the vision goes soft and wavers in the depths.

It dawns on him belatedly that he is alive.

He rises to his feet, unsteady, and looks up at the edges of this cell. He can't make out much beyond the thickness of heat and light. He turns, and as he turns he catches sight of that impossible reflection again.

It grins at him.

"Is _this_ the man," it calls, with carnival barker delight, "who shook the earth and made kingdoms tremble? The man who made the world a wilderness, who overthrew its cities and would not let his captives go?"

Jack steps back. The reflection mirrors him. And then its foot lands on the stone beyond the ring of fire. It comes through brushing flame from its suit jacket, just as white as Jack's stifling winter coat. Its face is and isn't his, pulled strangely and grinning and recognizable, painted like a dream of hell. It reaches out and, as Jack trembles, straightens Jack's lapels with both hands.

"How far you have fallen," it says, "morning star, son of the dawn!"

Now that the moment has arrived, the nightmare to end all living nightmares, it is nothing like Jack imagined it would be. The sea is gone, the night is gone, and all that remains is light, light, _light_

It pats him on the cheek. "Now _that_ ," it says, "is funny."

Jack slaps the hand away, life flooding back into his limbs all at once. "You," he says. Yesterday’s worries on the roof flood through his mind in fast forward, god, was it only yesterday? His heel scuffs the floor as he takes another step back. 

The Joker, grinning and unmistakable, advances. "Well it ain't Santy Claus, that's for sure." He pauses, hip cocked, and presses a finger to his cheek. "You know, you're a bit slow on up uptake, boyo."

Those really are his eyes.

Bruce and him, but now it does make sense, it makes sense in the worst way. It's purer, cleaner than the vision of dark rooms and blackmail, and it is infinitely worse. All at once, the day is catching up with him.

"But I love—" Jack says, "loved—"

"Well of course you did," the Joker says, twirling his palm as he shrugs. "Everything you've done, you've done—for—love."

A memory swims up into his mind, the last memory, of Bruce’s gloved hand reaching to him desperately through the green. This isn’t like those things at all, the harlequin madness and the technicolor sadism of the newsreels. That was torture and this is… protection…

A hand reaching down through the green. Is it the _last_ memory, or…? He isn’t sure anymore.

He dares to look back, for a second, and all at once the Joker is right in front of him, leaning forward, like a visitor inspecting art in a museum. He jumps. The Joker lifts a brow and straightens up. 

"Yeesh," he says, "what a basket case you are! Just as well that your turn's up. I'm gonna be washing the smell of anxiety out of our hair for _weeks_."

Jack freezes. _"My_ turn," he says. "My _turn?_ This is my life, Mister, not yours. Not—not anymore, anyway..."

That started out strong enough, but he's wavering, under the weight of everything this _means_ , and the Joker sees it. His red-rimmed eyes glitter.

"What do you _really_ think you're protecting here?" the Joker says, hands clasped behind his back. "You were doomed from the moment Batsy-boo put on the suit. Oh, he's not finished baking yet, but the day is coming isn't it? You can feel it. Ripples in the water. Our boy never can resist meddling. One of these days the toys and the kids won't be enough, if not tonight then some night soon, and then... he'll go down into the darkness... and peel off his pretty little person suit once and for all."

"He doesn't," Jack says, _"have_ to. He doesn't have to be that person."

Joker thumps himself on the forehead, gloved palm to translucent skin. "Wake up and smell the bacon," he says, "he's always _been_ that person. Give or take a little trauma, here and there. You can't fight this pattern, kiddo. As long as you exist, he exists. As long as he exists, you exist. You thought throwing yourself on some kind of cosmic knife was going to _end_ that?"

"If I—If I die here—"

 _"Die?"_ the Joker crows. _"Die?_ You can't die, they'd never stand for it. Anyway, you're not looking at the bigger picture."

The Joker loops his arm around Jack's shoulder and pulls him in tight. He spins them around to the towering wall of fire, green like the chemical depths of the sea, green like acid. Nothing on earth burns green, Jack thinks dimly, not the sky or the moon or the fires we build. Nothing is supposed to give off a light like that. He is stiff as a board in the Joker's grip.

The Joker waves a hand at the leaping expanse, and shapes begin to grow in the depths of the fire, their edges flickering wickedly.

"Once upon a time there was a man," the Joker says, "or a boy, perhaps. And was he ever unlucky! He had everything, a family, a life, an identity, and then—poof!—in the course of one bad day, he was nothing. A nobody."

The shape in the fire is Bruce, but not the armored Bruce of minutes before. It's just Bruce, hunched over in the study, his head in his clutching fist. That was how he looked the night after he got the call about the warehouse shooting, how he looked with the photo album spread out across the table in front of him. Jack tastes ashes.

"It's amazing how quickly you can lose everything," the Joker says. "So impermanent, this life! What does any of it matter, when tomorrow it will all be gone? What does it matter that you were happy, or in love? Who cares! It never last! It's all a cruel joke; they only give you enough that it will _kill_ you when you lose it all again."

The shapes of darkness in the light flicker and shift—little round beads all scattered like teeth, the shape of wings against a window, a spotlight against the sky.

"You know what I mean," the Joker says. "Your boy out there has never felt that kind of pain, he doesn't know yet! He's so young! So fresh and whole! He's never lost anything that mattered. But he'll know soon, oh yes, he'll know what it feels like to scream for relief that never comes."

“It all ends the same way,” the Joker goes on. “Whether you walk into these jaws or he does.”

Jack stares at the kaleidoscope of tragedy before him, mouth open, terror sinking its teeth into his heart. The Joker leans in, tucking back a lock of hair that Jack shook loose in his tumble.

"You know what the funniest part is?" he asks, a whisper in Jack's ear. " _You_ made him love you."

Jack rips out of his grip, staggering back across the floor. "No," he says, "no, I'm not—I'm not important enough—"

"Of course you are!" the Joker says, delighted. "You're the clown prince of crime! The harlequin of hate! You have laid low the nations, sweetheart, there's no going back from that. What, you _want_ to be an assistant butcher to some pigfaced blowhard, living in a tenement in the narrows, dead from a self inflicted gunshot wound before the age of forty?"

How can he answer that question? Of course he doesn't want that, of course not. But that's not—that's not what this is _about._

The Joker holds out his empty palms, a sign of surrender that Jack knows better than to trust. He comes forward, slowly, until he is within arms' length of Jack. "You _are_ somebody, sweetheart," he says. "You're the last face that men see before the bottom of a grave. You're the sound of five shots spinning in the barrel of a revolver. You are the _light,_ sweetheart, you are the sun that scorches the planet, the smell of rot, the buzz of flies."

His hand comes up, rests lightly against Jack's heart.

"You are the necessary end," he says. "The punchline and the set up. Without the light, you can't have darkness."

The Joker's hand lifts, cups the curve of Jack's jaw. He is sweet-faced now, sympathetic, clicking his tongue in a motherly way.

"He needs you," the Joker says. "He needs you now more than ever. You have to show him, you see? You have to show him the light. Show him what it means to suffer, to live, to be loved. If you die here, he'll be alone. You have to show him what pain _means_."

"I don't want to," Jack says, feeling wretched. "I want to sit on the balcony and, and, drink coffee with him, I want to hold him with my own hands! In my own arms! I want to be _loved."_

"You think he's gonna love you when he knows what you are?"

It's a terrible thought. No, how could he? How could anyone as good as Bruce love someone like—someone who—

"And what are you gonna do when he dies? You know the life expectancy in Gotham, and that's not even taking into account how many people are already looking down the scope of a rifle at the bouncing baby billionaire. There's gonna be more nights like tonight. You can't protect something by cuddling it and feeding it scraps and crying when it takes a bullet to its pretty little head."

The inferno around them roars, licking over its edges.

"He has to be stronger. He's gotta be strong enough to do what it takes."

Jack feels the tears in his eyes but he can't bring himself to wipe them away. Doesn't he have a choice? Doesn't he have a choice at all?

The Joker, or the thing that looks like him, gently pulls Jack down and presses a kiss to his forehead, and in the searing chemical agony of those painted lips there is

                       A yellow flower growing from bare skull in the wilderness,

              Saltwater taffy dripping over a drowned boardwalk,

        A whisper under an umbrella at the edge of a muddy grave that says, “he was only a week from retirement—”

Jack looks into the light and he knows that he has no choice, that his time is coming, and that all of this is crashing to an end—the long domestic dream of these last few months, the fear and the nightmares, the drudgery, but also the sweetness... He has never had a choice, that's the whole _point_.

Just wanting things to be different has never stopped the bad things from happening. Nothing ever stops them, not for long. He has never had the power to change anything. 

Joker pulls back. "You and I both know," Joker says, "that madness is like gravity! All you need is a little—"

The fire twists and leaps around them, the floor rushes up to meet him, he is falling, he is tumbling into an abyss as green as the chemical sea

"—Push!" 

 

 

 

In his white coat, sootless and shining, the Joker leans against the chamber door and laughs. His shadow is cast out in front of him in green fire, long and flickering. In the room beyond, countless tangled bodies freeze mid-blow. The woman in the shattered helmet looks up from the floor, the skin over her teeth and gums torn open at last from jaw to lip.

The Joker laughs and laughs and laughs, barely able to hold himself up with how hard he's wheezing.

"No," the batman says. It's a soft sound. The sound of true horror is always such a soft sound. So he didn’t know after all! Jeeze louise, what a farce.

Joker lifts his head. He wipes a tear from his eye, trying to catch his breath. "Darling," he manages.

All those pretty shiny little robins are drawing back. Even the military types are retreating, although slower. The pipsqueak with the fancy gear is the only one who stands his ground. "You," he says. But thoughtful, not like his old knight.

"Me," Joker says, showing all his many teeth. "Well this is a hell of a welcome back for your old pal Joker, huh? Nobody thought to bring a cake, I see."

Someone clicks open a pair of handcuffs.

"Ah ah ah," Joker says, lifting a finger. "None of that now. Why, I haven't even committed a crime yet! We really will have to rectify that..."

From Scylla's collapsed form, Joker leans down and takes back his gun. What a quaint thing it is! But you can't beat the classics. Speaking of which.

In one smooth motion, Joker cocks the gun and points it at the twerp who was too dumb to retreat like the rest of his buddies. He knows this one. This is one the _real_ wonder boys, batsy's darling protégés. Joker doesn't need to look at the batman to know what expression his face will take, or even to hear the sharp hiss of breath, although he does hear that, and he appreciates it.

"Jack," the batman says, one syllable shot through with quiet desperation. "Jack, what are you doing?"

"Darling, please, try to keep up," Joker says. "I'm pointing a gun at your kid."

"But _—why?"_

"What a silly question," Joker says. He keeps the sights pinned on robin, following each twitch of his little body. "I'm about to blow this popsicle stand, and I'd like it to be sans those pretty bracelets the brat is holding. It's nothing personal, this is a hell of a party, but I've been out of the game for _quite_ a while and I'm eager to get back to work."

He feels a little bit like a frog coming up from a deep hibernation, taking in its first air after the winter. All the old aches are remembering themselves, one by one, and Joker takes a deep sweet breath of the pain that he was born into, now and once before. Everything hurts, and everything sings, and the world is a riot of spinning neon that screams for his attention.

"Jack," the bat says again, moving towards him.

A new impulse comes through him in a flash of white noise, almost religious in its ecstasy. Shoot the kid. Blow his little brains out and walk the spray pattern like a red carpet up to the light, out of this cave, into his kingdom. Won't the big old bat cry _then_ , won't he ever.

His fingers twitch. But the trigger holds steady.

"Jack," the bat says, softly, "you don't have to do this. Come with me. I'll get you out of here."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Joker says. "Off to Arkham, just like old times, dust off the old cell."

"You haven't done anything yet," the batman says. "Don't cross that line, please, Jack. Put the gun down."

The Joker starts laughing again, and the sights of his gun wobble. Robin twitches, like he's about to make a run for it, and without a word Jack fires off a warning shot into the stone behind him, _crack bang_ , the explosion rattling the walls of the cavern. Everyone flinches.

"I haven't," he echoes, in the deafening silence, "I haven't, he says—!"

Something is twisting his chest, deep in the cage that holds his withered heart, but he doesn't know what it is. This is funny! This is really funny! Batsy doesn't think he's _done_ anything yet. As if Joker isn't the one painted in so much blood that the Nile itself runs red around him. As if the nervous wisp of a nobody who haunted his bed for six months had ever been anything but a ghost of the true monster!

"We should have quit while we were ahead!" Joker says, the tears in his eyes only half mirth now.

The bat is coming towards him, and before Joker knows what he's done, the barrel of the gun is pointed at that armored chest. The flutter of cape, a shape that has haunted his dreams since he was born sobbing with laughter into the arms of this miserable world. The bat makes a sharp warning gesture at his robin. All these months, and Jack never dreamed of bats. He wonders why that was.

The bat keeps his slow advance, palms out, and why is that so familiar? "Jack," he says. "I want to help you.”

Joker bares his teeth, pulling back into himself. “You don’t even know what I am yet.”

“I know who you are.” The crack down his chest is starting to shed bits of matte plastic. “You’re the man I love.”

"You loved a paper doll!" Joker snarls. His grip shakes. "Jack is dead! Jack was never alive!"

"That's not true. You're still him, I can see it in the way your hand is shaking."

Joker closes his other hand over the shaking one. It helps a little. So he can remember all of it, so what? What good does it do him to have the memories of some wet little nancy knocking around in the old noodle if that person _never really existed?_

"I didn't ask for this!" Joker yells, "I didn't ask to be your boyfriend or your charity project or your devoted _pet_ , Bats! I didn’t ask for this god damn half life, or your god damn _mercy._ ”

The barrel of the gun thumps into the bat's chest, where it trembles and squeaks across the Kevlar. The day they went ice skating, early into that delicate friendship, and Jack didn't know how to do it—his hand against Bruce's chest, the hard panes of muscle, as they drifted across the ice—it was spring, not yet green but smelling of wind from the south, from the ocean—

"What does it matter? What does any of it _matter?"_ Joker shouts, burying the barrel in Kevlar. "It doesn't last! It can't ever last! What does it matter if we were _happy!"_  

The heavy weight of gauntlets close gently around the back of his head and pull him in close. Joker's arms fall, numb, at his sides.

"Maybe it matters," says the quiet voice in his ear, "because we _were_ happy."

A dim awareness of the rest of the world is coming back to him, of the many bodies watching this exchange, all their shadow puppet shapes suspended in the darkness. They don't matter to the Joker. They've never mattered, except in the way that the faceless shadow of the audience beyond the stage lights matter. Now, not even that.

"I should have killed the brat," he whispers. "Then you wouldn't be holding me like this."

The hold around him tenses. "I wouldn't. But you didn't, and you could have. I know the difference."

"I could still do it."

This embrace is swallowing him whole, eating him alive. He's not Jack, but Jack isn't gone like he should be either. Whoever he _is_ , he can't forget the taste of coffee on the balcony under a pale sunrise, not any more than he can forget the taste of gunpowder and blood licked from the mouth of this terrified city.

He could still do it. It's all on him now—if he crosses that line, then the batman will fear him and love him and hate him the way he's supposed to, and the dance will resume. A thousand glittering nights under the moonlight, rooftop chases, their topsy-turvy chivalrous tragedy. That was all he ever asked for, all he was ever meant for, and god _damn_ the waters that gave him something else instead.

"Will you?" the Bat says.

Does he have a choice? Is there still a moment left in which he can choose and not be chosen for? Wanting things to be different never stopped the bad things from happening. But he _is_ the bad thing, this time. Does he- Can he-

If he can choose one thing—even if only for a moment, even if only in the span of this moment, the infinite ocean of this moment that holds them and all that they have been—to be a thing that does not burn, that does not hurt? 

The stock of the gun creaks in his grip, and then all at once it hits the ground with a _thunk._ That old bastard Jack, he got the last laugh, didn't he?

He lifts his shaking hands. Bruce’s back feels broad and familiar, more familiar than he ever could have dreamed. Beneath the surface of the water, the depths are clear and green. Through the weight of it, if you just float up, you can almost see the sky.

 


	3. Bishop's Knife Trick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where do we go from here?

The car hums new and hot with power, taking turns on these mountain roads faster than its fuddy duddy owner ever would have done it, whoever that guy might have been. The man who was once the Joker slams the brakes as he comes around a stony corner and up onto a clearing in the pine forest. The trees have all been torn out here. The grass in the headlights is too green for the time of year, rolling down to the sheer edge without stop, and beyond that, the silver speckled sky.

The car skids and spins, scraping black tire tracks into the pavement and then deep into the immaculate lawn. The black earth splits underneath it.

Someone who could not easily have been mistaken for Jack, of the uninteresting nickname and the nervous ticking fingers, steps out of the glittering red car. He had seen its owner fumbling with their keys, and on a cruel whim, cracked the man’s face into a No Parking sign and taken the liberty of a free ride for his efforts. The city was too tight around him, like a skin that hadn’t finished shedding, and he’d thought—let’s take a ride, get some perspective.

In the back of his head, there’s that meddling super fool saying, “Don’t lose sight of the bodies in the rubble.”

After everything, the fire and smoke and fear, he’d arrived in the narrows as evening was falling, alone on the doorstep of the apartment Jack had rented. In all of its dingy corners and glowing venetian blinds, he almost hoped to find—to find some of the nightmare that Jack had lived in, some monster that he could understand at last. But there was nothing left in it but mundane wretchedness. Nicotine caked into the wallpaper, cracks in the plaster. No monsters under the bed. No eyes in the blinking blue neon. No worse or better than any of the thousand safe houses and hidey holes visited in the long career of a Gotham criminal.

He stood for a long time in the doorway, waiting for the terror to find him, and when at last it did not, he took his hat from the coat rack and left.

The hills above Gotham have a view all the way to the bay, if you can catch them on a clear day. There’s a cabin on a lake up here that the Waynes own, and it occurs to him now that he’s driving the same road up to it that they took last August. The house is so clear in his memory, clearer than any of the jackinthebox funfairs where he spent raucous blood-soaked nights in his previous life. The mist rising off the lake in the cool blue twilight. Will its long windows with their open glass unnerve him the way they did before, or will they be just another lost moment, like the dismal apartment, another meaningless remembered sensation?

This lawn where he’s thrown his stolen car into park is going to be the site for a mountain house, as the real estate agency’s _Sold_ sign says. It’s loose in the grass, where the soil isn’t deep enough to keep it upright, and he pushes it over with one finger as he passes. It makes a rattling noise as it bounces off the turf behind him.

He takes a seat on a surge of stone that breaks through the grass like a tooth from gums, just at the edge of the steep plummet. Over the shoulders of the hills below, he can just make out the foggy glittering ruin of Gotham, like glass broken across the ground. Here and there, the slow red blinking of relay towers.

What a thing perspective can do for a man, eh?

He sits there for a long time, doing nothing. The riot of sensation that came with this new/old body is finally settling down into something he can set aside, the years of familiarity calming it into a manageable clamor at the back of his head. Hell’s bells, what a pain it is to be born. All that light and noise and headache. Now it’s quiet. Now it’s just John Doe, the unknown specter, high above the city.

It’s beautiful. It would be even more beautiful if it were on fire, but he’s so tired. Too tired for anything that grand and spectacular.

He remembers that final stand, the last night in this body. There was so much smoke, so much gorgeous madness, the parade floats and the screaming children, but god it feels like it was a thousand years ago now. All of it seems so far away, all the meticulous effort he put into that spectacle and all the hundreds of schemes before it, fracturing and fragmenting the further back he tries to go. Less than a year, and everything he was then has become as distant and hollow as the projection of film on a silver screen. There was something so unrelentingly real about Jack’s life, like terracotta and tweed under fingers, textured to the point of pain.

He hears the sound of knuckles rapping curiously on glass. He doesn’t turn.

“And all this time I thought you couldn’t drive,” Bruce remarks, ruefully.

“You’re not supposed to be the world’s greatest detective right now,” John Doe says, “you shouldn’t be able to find me.”

He can almost feel Bruce coming closer, like a magnetic pull down his spine, like a six sense that only cares for one thing: a single north point on his inscrutable compass.

“You always say that the mountain house is the most peaceful place you’ve ever been,” Bruce says. “I thought maybe you were looking for… some of that.”

Bruce perches on the stone beside him, barely taking up a fraction of the space that John Doe has laid claim to. His arms are crossed, his old jeans hugging his thighs. That night on the park bench he looked a little like this, all rugged and tired, Walt Whitman tragic. Why is he still so god damned attractive?

“How long were you gonna wait to tell me about the Bat?” John Doe asks, as his lip curls back. He wants to cut, because cutting is what he _does_.

“I don’t know,” Bruce admits. “I hadn’t gotten that far. I wasn’t even sure—I wasn’t committed, until I heard you were gone, and then I had the cowl on before I even knew I had pulled it out.”

“Liar,” John Doe says. “You started shaving a month ago. You knew what you were gonna do.”

Bruce lets out a sad little laugh. “I guess I wasn’t thinking about it like that at the time,” he says. “I thought I…”

“You thought you could show up once and flash your utility belt and go home, and everything would magically get better?”

He can _hear_ the way Bruce is frowning, forehead creasing. “No, I just thought… people were getting hurt, and I had the tools, and if there was something I could do then I could at least do _that.”_

“What a life!” John Doe says, “Your little wife homemaking in a nervous tizzy as you heroically swoop through the city. One day they bring your body home riddled like swiss cheese and some street cop has to explain how you were found in a gutter dressed up like a rat.”

“It wasn’t _like_ that,” Bruce says, turning on his perch. His heel hits the grass. “You’ve got so much on your plate just managing your own mental health, I didn’t want to—I couldn’t put my own problems on you too. I could handle it on my own. It was my mess, not yours.”

“But it wasn’t your mess!”

Bruce digs the heel of his palm into his forehead. “It _was_ my mess,” he says. “It still is. There’s a hole in this city shaped like me, and I can’t ignore it for much longer. I’ve tried, god Jack, I’ve _tried_. I wanted to have a life with you, a real life, like real people.”

“I’m not Jack. Whoever that was, it wasn’t me _.”_

“I don’t believe that.”

For the first time, John Doe turns. He pulls a leg up under himself and leans forward, pushing too far into Bruce’s space, flashing his teeth in the dark. “You don’t _want_ to believe that,” he snarls. “I have carved the skin from my own face for you, Bruce Wayne, I have burned your children to ashes and I have poisoned an entire city for you. Jack could never have done that. Jack was _weak_ and _scared_ and now he’s _dead!”_

Everything is crashing together in a churning mess, the time before and the time after, one lifetime trying to drown another. Dyonesium and fire, smoke, immortality only a handbreadth away. He’s breathing hard. “I was your friend, and you threw me away! I never wanted to be your lover! I only ever wanted you to love me, to fear me, the way I loved and feared you—from your endless series of melodramatic rooftops, stronger and better—”

John Doe pants, and realizes that he’s taken Bruce by the collar, clutching desperately at his leather jacket. Bruce holds his ground, proud chin, chest slowly rising and falling.

He’s lost the thread of this conversation. All he can see is iris, pale blue and glowing in the headlights.

“I’ve listened to the last transmission that night,” Bruce says, evenly, “and I promise you, whatever else happened between us—there at the end, even the person I was before, he knew. He understood what you were trying to do. I didn’t—I didn’t understand until now, knowing you… knowing who you are…”

John Doe sags. All that heartbreak, volatile as napalm; the lashing out, the bared teeth… all he’d ever asked for was a little appreciation. A little reciprocation. He hadn’t asked for the long domestic dream, for _tenderness_ , but that was what the water gave him anyhow.

“You think you know now, do you,” John Doe says. “What’s it matter to you! You don’t remember any of it.”

“Not the way you do,” Bruce concedes.

He wants to say that he misses that Batman, the creature he served and worshipped and sacrificed to, dark and dour and forever out of reach. But that’s the creature that Jack died to put off for one more day, and he is Jack, and he is lost in the wreckage of two minds splintering as they crash across each other.

“Underneath Wayne Manor,” Bruce says, slowly, “there’s a machine. A machine that could bring back that Batman. It has everything backed up from my mind the night before the cave-in, the person I was at that exact—” he opens his hand, “—snapshot of time. Before whatever it was that we said in the cave. Maybe before I understood…”

He looks down at the hands loose around his collar, forgotten.

“I’d have to die,” he says. “To use it. I tried before, but it won’t take as long as I have a living mind, with my own thoughts and memories. I have to achieve brain-death before it can overwrite me. That’s what Scylla was talking about. I have to die for that man to live. Sometimes I feel like she was right, like maybe that is how it has to be. Didn’t a part of him die that night in the alleyway? Am I that part?”

John Doe searches in the face of this man for something to ground himself on, something to make the rage of mismatched memories quiet their screaming. The mythic and the mundane are at war inside him, incompatible and howling.

“I used to think, when you change that much,” Bruce says, “doesn’t the person you used to be die, in a way?”

John Doe gives him a mirthless smile. “Used to?”

Bruce smiles his heartbreaking crooked smile, his sleepless night dragging at all his angles. “I know better now.”

 John Doe lets go of the collar abruptly, hands hovering in the air between them.

The broken glass pinpoints of the city below them glitter. That neon purgatory of the soul, their shared home. He had always belonged, that’s the bad joke of it.

“Do you still,” Bruce starts. “Even though I’m not him, do you still—”

“Heh.” John Doe sits back on his palms, watching the sky. “I’m still yours. I’ve always been yours, Brucie boy. Since the first time I saw your shadow in the chemical factory, I was gone.”

“Really?” Bruce says, and his voice is so fragile, so uncertain, that the part of the man which had been the Joker wants to take him now and gently break him open, to crack him apart and make him _cry_.

But the man who would cry for the Joker, who is brave or stupid enough to be fragile in front of the creature who more than once tried to murder him, that is the man who held him as he came apart at the seams in a dingy tenement in the narrows, who brought him croissants at work, who defended him to Alfred without a second thought. It’s all one and the same, the weakness and the strength, and for the first time John Doe has the understanding it takes to wonder if the Joker had it wrong the whole blasted time—maybe it was the human part, the _soft_ part, that made the Batman what it was…

If he succeeded in cutting the love out of that, what would have been left?

“Whoever you are,” John Doe says, instead, “it’s only ever been you.”

Bruce reaches out, his movements unsure and achingly vulnerable, and then he pulls John Doe against him, tucking him in tight against his broad chest. John Doe shivers. It’s cold up here, in the wind and the coming winter. He’s only just noticing it.

“What now?” Bruce says.

John Doe chokes out a laugh, burying himself in Bruce’s shirt. Isn’t it funny how Jack thought he was no one? He _is_ no one, now, not jack and not joker, a nothing caught between two lives. An unidentifiable body on the slab.

What are his options really. He’s always hated the god damn butcher’s shop. He won’t be caught dead crawling back to that life. But what’s left? The moment he crosses that line, crowns himself in that final bloody laurel wreath, all the warmth of his life with Bruce will die forever. Maybe Bruce will still love him, the way that the batman before him did, but there can’t ever be a _life_ like that. There can only be the long breathless rollercoaster down to their eventual murder-suicide, gorgeous and exciting and cold cold cold.

“With this face,” he says, gesturing towards the face in question, “I’ve got limited choices.”

“You can always come home with me,” Bruce says, tightening his hand around John Doe’s shoulder. “Say the word. I’ll take you home.”

“Home! What a word.”

“I mean it.”

John Doe runs his gloved finger down the zipper of Bruce’s jacket, unable to feel the sensation. “Suppose I kill you in your sleep? Hmm? I could flip at any minute now.” 

“You won’t,” Bruce says, easy and certain.

“…No,” John Doe says. “I won’t. But I could do so much worse, darling, so much worse than you can even imagine as you are.”

“I believe in you,” Bruce says.

The finger pauses, in the middle of its trajectory down the zipper. It shakes. How can it be that simple for him? It’s naïve, that’s what it is, and John Doe cannot tell if he wants to preserve that innocence or shatter it irreparably. What a heavy burden it is to be trusted. What a heavy fucking burden.

“You can’t be batman like that,” he says, shaking his head. His cheek brushes metal. “They’ll eat you alive.”

“I can,” Bruce says. “I will.”

“You can,” John Doe mocks, “you will. You sound like you’ve already made up your mind.”

“I guess I have.”

“You can always die after all. That’s still an option.”

Bruce lifts his hand to John Doe’s cheek, curving his fingers over the hard angles. His skin is so cold. “You didn’t die,” he says. “You’re still here. A little different, but still here.”

It’s pointless trying to argue this semantic, even if it was certain, which it isn’t. Not that he hasn’t spent his whole life up until now trying to argue a pointless semantic with Bruce, and racking up a body count to shame entire regimes. That’s something else that has changed in him. He doesn’t want to nail himself to this nihilistic cross anymore. He just wants _rest._

Bruce’s thumb runs over his cheekbone. “Why can’t we be both?” he says. “What does _Scylla_ know about any of it? Who says anyone has to die?”

Someone always has to die. That’s life. Everyone dies sooner or later. Still, the sentiment rings true. Even the joker in him, he knows that there’s no such thing as dying for a cause—there is only dying, and then being dead. Why should either of them burn their ships for a war that can have no winners.

John Doe lifts his hand and covers Bruce’s. He thinks of the last morning, in the bedroom, when he told Bruce how much he loved him, how sorry he was that he couldn’t do more.

They are on the verge of something new, aren’t they? This is truly unmarked territory.

He can’t go back to the apartment and the butcher’s shop, living his life under a face full of makeup, dyed hair, pretending not to know what he knows. Everything in him screams in revolt.

He can’t go back to ravaging the nations, blood and terror, fire and bedlam. The appeal is still there, but he doesn’t know how to find that madness again. That’s a terrible freedom, cold freedom, and he knows all too well that he can’t cut his moorings now. They’ve become too much a part of him. 

What’s left?

He looks up at Bruce, the hand under his glove slowly slowly warming. His life has always revolved around Bruce, one way or another. He’s been whatever Bruce needed him to be—a nemesis, a friend, a lover. The truth is, whatever he is next, it’s bound to be more of the same.

No going back. Now there’s only forward.

If Bruce is going out there into the big bad world, all soft-skinned and newborn, someone is going to have to watch over him. Someone is going to have to make sure the fist of the world doesn’t crush him beyond repair.

He doesn’t know what that entails, exactly, but for the first time a future is starting to form before him.

“Jack?” Bruce says, as the silence stretches. “Are you here with me?”

Bruce believes in him. Maybe his faith is misplaced. Maybe not. It’s heavy, but it is also a weight to hold onto, something you can grip with both hands.

“Yes,” Jack says. “I’m here.”

He grips on with both hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [my ko-fi, if you're feeling generous](https://ko-fi.com/desdemonakaylose)   
>  [play the credits out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXQGbHyX3rM&t=0s&list=PL18Z5FjZ7wjNXTITxSxcbV7lMTVRWWyiL&index=7)


End file.
